


A Trick a Day

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-09
Updated: 2008-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:56:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phoenix Wright needs some time to recuperate. There's really only one place to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Trick a Day

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place immediately after the events of Trials and Tribulations, but contains spoilers up through Apollo Justice. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/69779.html).

-

 

**(after awhile you learn)**

"Franziska," Edgeworth said, folding his arms and drumming his fingers impatiently on his biceps. "There's a homeless man asleep on our front porch."

"I see him, Miles." Franziska locked the car and slid the keys into her pocket, her brows knitted together. "Should we wake him up?"

"I'd rather not," he wrinkled his nose distastefully, eyeing the shadowy figure slumped on his stoop, a coat pulled high over his body. The sun had set and the house was dark, so the von Karma crest was smudged into inky blackness; nevertheless, they knew their own house too well to hope the interloper was somebody else's problem. "It's not a particularly kind thing to do. And these pants are new. I don't want to risk them."

She rolled her eyes at him expressively, but when they went in the side door, she put milk into a saucer and placed it out on the front porch with deliberate, poignant cruelty.

They didn't have to wait very long: scarcely an hour after they ate dinner and retreated to their respective ends of their father's house, the doorbell rang. Edgeworth rose to answer it, prepared to apologize for his sister's reprehensible sense of humor. He didn't get the chance.

Their vagabond was a man, and the sight of his face, bathed in the light coming from the entryway, drove Edgeworth back a step, knocking him into an end table. The resulting clatter was enough to rouse Franziska from her study, and she appeared, knife in hand, her face showing how keenly she missed her whips and how much she meant business.

Phoenix Wright looked from one to the other nervously. His chin was darkened by a five o’clock shadow and the state of his suit suggested he'd been in a fight. The most surprising thing, however, was the sweet-faced, sleepy girl he held on his hip. She was entirely too old to be carried like that; she looked not a day older than Edgeworth had been when his father died, but Phoenix seemed to be an utter loss as to what else to do with her. A cape was draped hap-hazardly around both of them. It was the only possession either of them carried.

"I'm in trouble," he said without preamble.

Franziska lowered her knife. "And you couldn't've called?" she asked disgustedly. "Given us a little warning?"

Phoenix blinked, and wordlessly, Edgeworth reached out, yanking him inside and closing the door behind him, leaving nothing on the stoop by a saucer of milk and the gathering shadows.

 

**(the subtle difference between holding a hand)**

 

Edgeworth and Franziska stood in the doorway, watching him gingerly place the sleeping girl on top of the covers. With fumbling, inexpert fingers – he had never undressed a child before – he removed her top hat and her coat and placed them on the rocking chair by the dresser, the one that had belonged to Franziska's mother and fell neatly into the white, frustrated tracks she had rocked into the wood.

Realizing he probably should have pulled the covers back before he set her down, Phoenix frowned, thought for a moment, and then went to the other side of the bed and folded that half of the covers over her, like a quilted omelet.

"We do have a sleeping bag you could use, if the bed proves too difficult for you, Wright," Edgeworth said dryly.

"I'll be fine, thanks," Phoenix replied tersely, and then glanced up at both of them. "Thanks," he said again, more sincerely this time.

If there was anybody in the world who could understand the cruelty of asking questions now, it was Edgeworth and Franziska. With a light, "good night," they both left, and Phoenix lowered himself as gently as possible onto the bed, leaning up against the headboard. He remained that way for the rest of the night, drifting in and out of sleep, and always keeping one eye on the girl at his side, like he was afraid if he blinked, she would disappear.

When he woke in the morning, there were two sets of clothes folded neatly at the end of their bed; the hoodie and the sweat pants were obviously Edgeworth's, but he had no idea where they'd found such nice clothes for a nine-year-old girl.

The smell of breakfast wafted up the stairs, and he put his head in his hands and fought the urge to start screaming and never stop.

 

**(and chaining a soul)**

The von Karma mansion was straight-forward and easy to traverse. There were three bedrooms; one for Franziska, one for Edgeworth, and the guest room that had previously belonged to the late Mr. and Mrs. von Karma, and the second-floor bathrooms were indistinguishable from the closets and the only way to find them was to guess. The ground floor was surprisingly bright, all open spaces and soft colors.

"My mother was an artist before she was married," Franziska told him when she caught him studying the trim above the kitchen counter. "She was the one who insisted that our house should look like an actual house and not a mental institution." As if reading his question before it even leapt to his lips, she added, "This is my home. I salvaged it from my father's lawyers: it's mine now, and I am not leaving."

"No more spur-of-the-moment trips to California for a good showdown in court?" he asked her coyly; there was something about bickering with Franziska von Karma that took his mind off everything else.

"I'll stop making those trips when you stop needing me to save you, you foolish damsel," she returned. She was no stranger to the burden of responsibility, but for a moment, he saw the flicker of the nineteen-year-old girl behind the prosecutor's ceramic face.

They were interrupted by a scuffling noise from the doorway; Trucy appeared, hair and clothes mussed from sleep, looking three-parts shy, one-part terrified. "I'm hungry," she announced, looking first to Phoenix and then to Franziska, like she wasn't sure who she was supposed to turn to. Then, "Where are we?"

 

**(love doesn’t meaning leaning and company doesn’t mean security)**

In the kitchen, Trucy nibbled away at her oatmeal and watched cartoons, which she seemed willing enough to be engrossed in, even though they were all in German. In the sitting room, Phoenix tore at his nails in a fit of restless energy.

"Start from the beginning," said Edgeworth, who seemed to have tapped into reserve stores of patience no one knew he possessed.

So he did; and for all his expertise in weaving a story together on the spot, he'd be surprised if they understood half of what came out of his mouth. He jumped around from one detail to the other so quickly, skipping ahead and backtracking and adding facts as they seemed appropriate. He told them about Trucy, about Klavier Gavin (whom they knew and who knew them, to nobody's particular surprise; Germany's prosecutors, as far as he was able to tell, were all related), about the murder and the trial and then he got to the point where he could say, "I lost. I lost the case."

Sitting on the arm of her brother's chair, Franziska quirked a disbelieving eyebrow.

"Wright," said Edgeworth acidly. "You've lost before. Do not try to tell me this ... breakdown of yours was caused by _losing?"_

Phoenix shook his head impatiently, returning their acerbic looks with one of his own. "If it were that simple, do you think I'd be here at all? I can handle loss. What I can't handle is ..." He glanced quickly towards the kitchen, and like lemmings, they followed his gaze. "She ... I'm the only thing she has left. The only thing in the entire world. And I don't know if I can protect her."

"How long are you staying?" Franziska asked.

A bubble of hysteria rose beneath Phoenix's ribs, pressing into his heart and lungs. He shrunk in on himself, shaking his head back and forth slowly, like a keening dog, hands gripping his hair. He hadn't the faintest clue what he was going to do now. He didn't know how to get back on his feet. He didn't know what was waiting for him back home; Maya's face flickered across his vision, and Pearl's, and Maggey's and Gumshoe's, and he imagined their condemnation and sunk further in on himself. He didn't know what drove him here; he had his papers and Trucy's, and at the time, that's as far as his reasoning went. It was the same reasoning that had driven him across a burning bridge less than a year ago -- only this time the consequences were a little bit higher than a fever and a bad case of the sniffles.

A small hand placed itself on his knee. "Mr. Wright?"

He looked up; both Edgeworth and Franziska had drawn closer, frowning in annoyance -- which was as close to concern as they ever got -- but it was Trucy's face that filled his vision. "Trucy," he replied, then shook himself all over. "Trucy, these are my friends, Miles Edgeworth and Franziska von Karma."

She turned obediently. "Lawyer friends?" she wanted to know.

"Yeah."

"That's cool," she smiled, and they startled him by smiling right back. "I think I like lawyers. The good ones are like magicians; they don't deceive with outright lies. They only trick the mind into believing something is true that isn't, like what Mr. Gavin did with the Judge. I wish I knew how you do it."

 

**(and kisses aren’t contracts)**

"No. N-no, I .... I can't. You know I can't. No. No! Don't ask me again, please, Maya. No.... I wish I knew. I wish I knew. No, I can hear her. Yeah, you better go. I know. I will. I'm sorry, too."

He stuffed his cell phone back into his pocket and buried his head into his arms with a shuddering sigh. The sweatshirt he wore smelled surprisingly of Edgeworth; not the mothball smell of something that'd been sitting in a closet for too long, but something that spent time close to soap and sweat. For the life of him, he couldn't imagine Miles Edgeworth in a sweatshirt any shade subtler than mauve.

"Mr. Wright!" Trucy bounded into the kitchen, her face aglow with excitement. "Mr. Wright! You'll never guess what Miss Franziska and me found in that bedroom of ours! Look!" she slammed two full decks of cards onto the table in front of him, yellowed at the edges and smelling like an old library. "They're really old! Old cards are always the best, you know. There are so many awesome things in this big old house! And Miss Franziska is so nice."

"Really?" Phoenix said in blank surprise, wondering if they were talking about the same person.

"Yeah! Say, how many card games do you know?" she asked with sudden interest.

"Uhhh.... I know ... War, I think. Oh, and Go Fish."

Trucy looked visibly wounded. "We're going to have to fix that."

"Are we now?"

"Yup. How about I teach you poker? I'm new at it, since Shadi only taught me a month ago, but I still remember all the rules!"

Phoenix studied her face, bright and wide and earnest, and remembered what he'd said earlier. _I'm the only thing she has left._ He didn't know the first thing about children; Pearl tended to do more taking care of him than visa versa, and here sat this little girl who was roughly the same age, who hadn't once asked why he'd taken her all the way across the world without explaining a single thing. Instead, she was trying to teach him a card game.

_The only thing in the entire world._

"Yeah, all right," he said, sitting up and rolling up his sleeves. "Bring it on."

 

**(you begin to accept your defeats with your head up, eyes open)**

His third day in the von Karma household, Phoenix was fairly certain he had the locations of the bathrooms sorted out. So it was with utter confidence that he walked right in on a freshly-showered Franziska, who snatched a towel from the edge of the tub with alacrity and a vicious snarl at him to get out, but not before he got a very good look at the heavy curve of her stomach.

All at once, a dozen obvious clues came rushing back to him. He felt like a complete idiot for not having seen it earlier.

First, there'd been the issue of the standing army of vitamins lined up by the kitchen sink, which at the time he'd just assumed was another token of the von Karma obsession. Then came Franziska's bedroom, which in the few instances he'd seen it, looked like it hadn't been slept in or lived in at all. The way Edgeworth always turned to her, and she to him, when they were uncertain, as if they valued the other's opinion as highly as their own. The way they looked at and spoke to Trucy; perplexed and curious and a little hopeful, like they'd never really seen a child before now. And here was Phoenix, blundering right in the middle of them without even a second thought, assuming everything would be exactly as he left it. It'd never occurred to him that they'd patched up what he had torn in them.

"You're pregnant," he said wonderingly, closing the door part way to give her her privacy back.

"Oh, hush," she said, scathing. "For the record, yes, I am."

He gripped the doorknob with a slippery hand, trying to absorb this news and all its implications. "Do you know ... ?"

"A boy," she said very softly. "I haven't told Miles yet."

"That you're pregnant?" Phoenix went, incredulous. "Franziska, he's as a brilliant a detective as he is a lawyer; he has to know." A thought occurred to him. "Unless it's not his?"

"You blithering idiot!" Franziska's voice turned poisonous. "Of course he knows! I haven't told him it's a boy. And it's certainly none of your business, anyway. May I remind you, Phoenix Wright, that you are here on our charity alone until you piece back together whatever bits of that fool mind of yours you've dropped everywhere? Our lives are well on tract without you getting in our way. You're his ... you're _our_ friend, and we will help you in whatever way we can, but by no means are you allowed to meddle. Do you understand?"

"No meddling," Phoenix repeated dutifully, like a scolded child. "No. Certainly no meddling. Not for me. Never again."

 

**(with the grace of an adult)**

Things changed after that. 

On the notion that he should earn his keep, he took to cleaning with a vengeance; by the end of the week, he'd dusted every available surface and organized and packed away all the things of Manfred von Karma's that Franziska hadn't had the heart to deal with herself and stuffed them away in the attic. He cleaned toilets and scrubbed tiles and scared Edgeworth with the ferocity he went after the spiderwebs in his study. He polished the tables and chairs while Trucy flipped idly through Edgeworth's old German workbooks; he liked listening to her practice the sounds, rolling the words clumsily over her tongue, as much as it chilled him. She didn't know how long they were staying. She took precautions.

"Wright, that's the fourth phone call you've ignored." Edgeworth scrutinized him over the top of his newspaper, as Phoenix took a minivac to the cushions of the couch. His cell phone lay on the coffee table, buzzing away. "If someone wants to get a hold of you that badly, perhaps it's an emergency?"

Phoenix paused, his face flickering with pain. He waited until the phone settled, and then said calmly, "She'll get over it. I paid her for this month and next's. She'll do fine on her own now."

Something guarded came to Edgeworth's eyes, and he looked at Phoenix like he saw him in a new light, while at the same time remembering the man who had begged him so hard to help him save Maya when she'd been kidnapped, and when she'd been trapped on the other side of the ruined bridge. "If anyone's found how hard it is to cut away our past, it's us, Wright," he informed him coolly. "She might not have to take care of you anymore --"

"She takes care of _me?_ She's the one who's nineteen!"

"-- but she certainly won't let you go without a fight."

"She'll be busy."

"And so will you. Have you gotten in touch with anyone who might know what to do about Trucy?"

Phoenix looked down at his knuckles.

"That's what I thought."

"What about you, Edgeworth?" he snapped, feeling cornered. "Your sister is going to have a baby, and nothing in this house is child-proofed." He held up the cord of the vacuum, which sparked angrily from where mice had chewed at it. "You've made absolutely no effort to set up a nursery. What are you waiting for?"

Edgeworth's brows came down and the newspaper collapsed in an angry explosion of noise. His mouth worked for a moment, coming to terms with the fact that Phoenix guessed and blindly nailed the truth on the head, like usual. "We're not keeping the child, Wright," he said flatly.

He blinked. "Does Franziska know this?"

"It was her idea. No child has ever done anything to deserve us, and the fact that we have the exact same parenting role model does not bode well for its future. We are no more fit to be parents than a lobster is to be a lawyer."

 

**(and not the grief of a child)**

He walked into the kitchen before dawn, electric razor to his chin, only to discover both Franziska and Trucy already awake. Franziska, yawning, stirred an absent spoonful of supplementary fiber or whatever prenatal medication she had to take into her orange juice. Her body was turned from the counter, making this task difficult, because Trucy's hands were on her belly, pulling her nightgown taut across the subtle swell of her pregnancy. She turned to press one ear against it, face fierce with concentration, arms sliding to hold her around the waist. Franziska, to Phoenix's great surprise, didn't even bat an eyelash.

Taking a long, wincing gulp of a drink he knew had to taste like cardboard, she placed a gentle hand on Trucy's head and asked, "Well? Do you feel anything?"

"Not yet," Trucy said, forlorn. "Just you swallowing, I think."

Her grip turned soft, less like she was holding her in place and more like an actual embrace. Chuckling, Franziska let her, face almost tender, almost glowing, almost motherly, if only any one of those adverbs used in conjugation with Franziska didn't herald the apocalypse. "The baby will be big enough for you to feel it kicking, soon, I think."

"Will I be there to see it born?" Trucy asked excitedly.

"You'll have to ask your ... your ..." she couldn't seem to find the right word for Phoenix, so she just amended. "We'll see."

In hindsight, that was probably the moment truth dawned on Phoenix; the most important thing weren't the questions. What could he have done differently? What was he going to do now? Could he ever get his attorney's badge back? 

The important thing was the answer. Her name was Trucy.

It wasn't about what he wanted to do -- defend the innocent, point violently at people, keep the Fey family out of trouble (again) -- but about what he needed to do.

 

**(you build all your roads on today)**

He shuffled his cornflakes around in his bowl unenthusiastically. In the seat across from him, Edgeworth steeped a cup of tea with one hand while editing a detailed list in a notebook of his. It engrossed him so thoroughly that any attempt at conversation was met with a temperamental grunt. So he startled Phoenix when he suddenly tossed the notebook at him.

"You're stir-crazy, Wright," he said by way of explanation. "So I'm sending you out. Purely in the interest of saving my furniture from any more of your housecleaning antics."

Phoenix sent the notebook a distinctly apathetic look; he couldn't think of anything else he'd rather not do. The directions were printed straight-forward and neat; the finishing address was boxed. It was a residential address. "Okay. Why here?"

"She's an ... old friend of ours." The ghost of a smile played at the edges of Edgeworth's lips. "You can't slum with us, forever, Wright, and I think you know this. I believe she said she'd give you the motivation you need. And don't worry," he added as Phoenix opened his mouth, brows quirked questioningly. "I've asked for the day off at the office. The child will by suitably babysat. I am sure she will not disappear if you turn your back on her, but as I have yet to convince you of this fact, I'll watch her."

Phoenix spared the directions another glance. "What does this friend of yours have to do with me?"

Edgeworth was definitely smiling now: that ironical smile of his, the one he wore when fate moved him directly into the path of something gigantic and bizarre, which it did with discouraging frequency. "I believe she was a classmate of Mia Fey's, way back when."

Phoenix was on his feet, rinsing out his bowl and trying to remember where he'd put his sandals so quickly that it didn't really register that Edgeworth was still talking.

"And for goodness' sake, don't wear that hat. I told her to be on the lookout for someone who appeared to have gotten on the bad end of a porcupine's genetics. Or stuck his finger in a light socket. Or --"

"I'm sure you had fun coming up with euphemisms for my hair. I can't imagine what mental image this poor woman has of me."

Edgeworth grinned.

 

**(because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans)**

He got lost, of course. 

As much as Edgeworth's instructions resembled the kind found on Baby Einstein, it still didn't make up for the fact that very few of the street signs were in English. After wandering around in circles for the better part of an hour in the cold and wishing that he'd brought his hat, he finally found someone who said, "yes, yes" to the final address (why hadn't Edgeworth bothered to include a name?) and pointed him in the direction of an apartment building.

Actually getting in and getting to her apartment door was a whole other confusing avenue, and if it hadn't been for another tenant who conveniently returned at that moment with her hoard of dalmatians, he probably wouldn't have gotten in.

He made it to her door in one piece, shivering and blowing on his fingers to restore feeling to them.

The woman who came when he rang the bell was enormously tall, dressed head to toe in something that cut across her figure and sparkled like a Christmas tree, making her look like a mannequin some hard-on-luck fashion designer had forgotten in a closet. However, all it took was one look at her hair, ice blue and falling across her shoulders in sleep-mussed curls, and her eyes, slanted like sunflower seeds, for him to recognize her.

"You're --!" he began, startled.

"I am Vanessa von Karma, yes, excellent," she said briskly, with an accent sharp like old cheese, standing back and gesturing him inside, her eyes wide and keen with interest. "Thank you for telling me."

Her apartment was like a blown-up, more detailed version of the trim around the von Karma kitchen. The living room rioted with broad designs and mixing colors, and furniture that neither matched entirely nor clashed. There were three pairs of shoes by the door, all different sizes. 

When he walked in, an ancient, grizzled dog lifted its head, eyed him mournfully, and put his head back on his paws.

Vanessa planted a hand on her hip and scrutinized him. "It is good to meet you, finally, Phoenix Wright. The man who got my father executed, who woke my little brother from his death-walk, and who turned my sister from a fancy-painted doll to a living, breathing, hating person. My Mia's most precious pupil. In front of me at last. I must say, your hair is not as dangerous as I was led to believe."

Phoenix ignored that. "Your Mia?" he echoed, with a sudden, sharp pang of hunger. He hadn't seen her, either in the features of his assistant or in his dreams or on the back of his eyelids in so long; he missed her with an acute, pulsing ache, like he had just lost her, like he hadn't grieved for her until that very moment. "What do you know about her?"

Vanessa smiled sympathetically, like she could see his thoughts. "Back when we, the von Karmas, lived in California, I was the teaching aide in a course she audited. My best friend was the brightest student in that class, and she took a shine to her, so I saw her frequently. Even though she was studying to become a defense attorney, she had a spirit that attracted everyone around her. I was fond of her, and proud, too, that she did right by you."

She steered him into her kitchen, following him in a slow, swaying walk like a praying mantis. He gratefully sank into a chair at the kitchen table.

She set tea and saucer in front of him; he got the distinct impression this was Edgeworth's influence. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he nodded to her fridge in order to distract her. "Who are they?" he asked, referring to a photograph of a boy and a girl, arm in arm on top of a picnic table.

Vanessa smiled. "Those are my children, Mr. Phoenix."

Suddenly, he knew where all the clothes for Trucy had come from.

She placed a small plate of biscuit-looking things on the table as well, and took the seat across from him, which gave her the appearance of a long-legged stork coming to roost uncomfortably. "I understand you have also found yourself with a little girl in custody."

Knee-jerk, Phoenix looked around him with a hot flare of panic, before remembering that he'd left Trucy back at the von Karma mansion. It felt strange, not having her sweet, smiling face nearby.

"Might I ask, what are your intentions for the girl?" Vanessa cocked a shrewd eyebrow at him.

Phoenix picked at something encrusted in the grain of her kitchen table, rather than tell her that he still didn't know. He'd had the faintest inklings of a plan earlier, just a little light hovering, unrecognized, at the corner of his mind ever since he'd first saw Trucy take a shine to the German vocabulary workbooks. However, he'd dropped the notion -- of asking Edgeworth and Franziska to raise her (their house was so big and she liked them so much!) or find someone respectable and trustworthy who would take her -- the day Edgeworth had told him, disgustedly, that he wasn't going to keep his own flesh and blood.

Although he said nothing, Vanessa seemed to understand what was on his mind. She offered him another biscuit. 

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Phoenix glanced around curiously. "Where _are_ your children?"

She shifted. "My eldest is in a class up at the university, I believe, although I think she might be out now. I haven't the faintest clue what she does with herself these days. My daughter -- the one whose clothes your Trucy so unceremoniously borrowed -- is up on the roof." She wrinkled her nose. "She has birds. Dirty, filthy birds, but as long as she cares for them so I do not have to, they are tolerable."

"And your son?" Phoenix prompted when she said nothing.

She drew her finger around the rim of her teacup. "Murdered. About ... seven years ago. Yes, it will be seven years in October. He was strangled and hung from a power line like someone's dirty sneakers. He was only six years old."

"Jesus Christ," said Phoenix blankly. Here he'd been, thinking the von Karmas had been the only ones in his acquaintance who hadn't seen a family member murdered. "What ... who ... why?"

"Oh, they arrested someone. Father was going to prosecute him, but Franziska begged for the chance. She was only thirteen at the time, and had been very close to my son. It was her first case. I protested vehemently, but she won a guilty verdict, of course."

"Isn't that good?" he asked, having caught the contrary in her voice.

"It was fine for awhile, yes, but then new evidence came up that suggested the time of death had been several hours later than had been presented in the autopsy. Franziska had jailed an innocent man."

"Oh. Oh, wow. So that's why she is so ..."

"In part, yes," Vanessa shrugged. "She did not do what was right, so she told herself that was not what court was about. She told herself it was about winning and perfection, and in that light, she had won. She forgot my son." She glanced at the photo on the fridge. "It was around that time I left my father's house, and my husband left me, and my father took Miles to America and left my mother to die alone."

She sipped at her tea, a loose strand of hair tangling around her fingers. "So, you see, Mr. Phoenix. You are surrounded by people who know how utterly a court case can destroy your life, and who can show you there is life afterwards. There always is."

The front door slammed, making Phoenix jump. The old dog pulled himself to his feet, shoulders first and hips slowly moving after, his tag giving one low, welcoming wag and his ears lifting up. "Vanessa!" a woman's voice chorused. "You won't believe what they just said to me at the post office! Hi, Phoenix! Has anyone taken you for a walk yet?" The last bit was directed to the dog, who answered with another thoughtful wag of his tail.

"Ah," said Vanessa knowingly, smiling over the rim of her teacup. "Perfect timing. I had been hoping she would arrive while you were here. Phoenix Wright, meet my adopted daughter --"

A teenage girl appeared in the doorway just as he turned around, rose-tinted glasses popped high on her skull and bag banging on the back of her hips. She stopped dead and his heart gave one fatal lurch inside of him, just as her eyes flicked up to his exposed hair. She clapped her hands to her mouth with a little shriek.

"Ema Skye!" Phoenix cried, almost tipping the antique chair over in his haste to get to his feet. 

Without hesitation, she flew to him with an open, friendly, astonished hug, the kind of embrace between people who weren't really friends, but survivors of the same devastating plane crash who'd happened to run into each other at the same department store sale. They hung onto each other, both laughing and talking at the same time.

"That's what I thought," Vanessa said to no one in particular.

 

**(and you’ll learn that even sunshine burns)**

Up streets and down boulevards, through alleyways and over fences and underground, Ema Skye and Phoenix Wright walked and talked. They saw more of Germany than they'd ever thought to explore on their own, or seen in post cards and PBS specials, but they were more interesting in watching each other when they thought the other wouldn't notice.

There really wasn't a whole lot of change to Ema; her face was slimmer and whiter, less like the pimply junior who'd cornered him into a job and more like clay, or a sliver of the moon. When she stopped to chat with a fellow university student, her German fumbled a little bit, but in comparison, it made her English sound more brazen and confident. Very little had changed about her physically or intellectually -- she still liked to ramble on about "scientific" things -- and yet it was obvious to see that Ema Skye had grown up.

She walked on the edge of the curb, one arm extended to keep her balance and the other hand resting on the strap of her bag, and he walked beside her, hands in his pockets. His throat hurt from talking, so it was her turn.

"My sister and Vanessa von Karma were both criminology students, way back when. I think that was the same one Mia Fey audited, wasn’t it? Vanessa was the teaching aide and my sister had the highest grade in the class -- they were close. She came over for dinner every now and then." She scuffed at the dirt with her toe. "So when Lana ... when Lana landed in jail, Vanessa said she'd take me. She'd just inherited the title to her father's house and Franziska -- that's her sister, maybe you've heard of her -- had left to find Mr. Edgeworth, so really wanted her and her daughter to have some company while she was cooped up alone in that big old house, babysitting it until her sister turned eighteen.

"She's possibly the nicest person I've ever met, Mr. Wright. She was so patient while I was learning German, and she has all these memories of Lana that had become foggy to me, so I never got homesick. Mr. Edgeworth comes by occasionally, so I've heard about some of the big cases you've solved since I last saw you."

She leapt up onto a lamp post, hair spreading out on the wind and bag heavy against the top of her thigh. Her smile was infectious. "What brings you to Germany?"

Phoenix looked down at his sandals, rocking up onto the balls of his feet in a movement he'd stolen unconsciously from Trucy. "No reason," he said lightly. "You know, I think Vanessa and Edgeworth might have conspired together to give me a day with you."

"Only a day?" she said, smiling off into the distance, fingers lingering on the pins on the front of her lab coat. "It's a bit silly, isn't it? I only knew you for about half a week, and yet, if anyone asks, I would say you were one of the most important people in my life."

He looked up at her sharply, suddenly and keenly aware that it was Trucy's story he heard coming now from Ema's mouth. All it took were three days for him to become the only soul on the planet who cared about her. Only, unlike Ema, Trucy didn't have a sister who could ship her off to a friend in Germany. All she had was Phoenix.

 

**(if you get too much)**

Franziska was the only one awake when he got home (and it was a little dangerous to think of it like that).

She lifted her eyes from her novel when he came in and kept them trained on him as he put the spare key away underneath the plant beside the entryway. "So," she said, sliding a bookmark in between the pages and leaning over to turn off the lamp, plunging them into darkness and giving him the impression that she'd only been staying awake until he returned, which made him feel a little guilty. He didn't know what time it was. "What are you going to do now, Phoenix Wright?"

"Right now I'm going to change my socks and put band-aids on my blisters. And then I'm going back," he said stoutly and without hesitation, struggling to make out her figure as it moved towards him. Her shadowed face tilted up to him, her nostrils flaring.

"Is Ema Skye going with you?" she asked coyly. His question must have been inherent in his silence, because she shrugged, "She has a very distinctive smell, my little adopted niece, kind of like a high school laboratory. I smell her on you. Nice pin, by the way." She drummed her fingers on the smiley face Ema'd given him.

_That's creepy,_ Phoenix wanted to tell her, but his mind was still buzzing with the events of the day, like he had just gotten up and remembered something he'd forgotten to do the night before. He bid her good night and headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He misjudged how many there were and she could hear him crash with a dull thud into the wall and cuss.

She smiled after him. She'd seen men go through this before. Something (or someone) had snapped everything into perspective for him, and if she closed her eyes, she could see his outline on the dark of her eyelids, smoldering and shaded with ashes, like he'd already risen out of it.

 

**(so plant your own garden)**

Ema lay still, listening to the sound of her roommate's whistle-like snore and the faithful tick-tock of the wall clock.

Finally, she moved, stretching herself across her mattress in order to turn her bed lamp on. Her sheets caught on her naked frame and the muscles between her legs twinged in protest, but she dragged the study guide she'd been ignoring the entire day to her.

"Someday, I'm going home," she whispered to the darkness. The clock ticked back supportively.

 

**(and decorate your own soul)**

The third time Trucy complained that she couldn't see, Phoenix grabbed her by the armpits and lifted her up onto his shoulders. She was a little too old for that, and he'd never really appreciated just how sharp children's butt bones were until hers dug him in the shoulders one time too many. Her hot little hands gripped the hem of his hat, where he'd pinned Ema's smiley face.

When the fireworks started – they’d been right, they really did have a fantastic view of them from the von Karma balcony – she gave a shriek of delight, snatching her top hat from her head and waving it around. Franziska laughed, half-leaning on Edgeworth's shoulder. Phoenix watched them and listened to them as if from a long way away.

He, Phoenix Wright, Miles Edgeworth, and Franziska von Karma, were more like children now that they'd ever been, walking around like they were convinced of their own immortality, their own invincibility.

_Time to grow up, Peter Pan._

"Hey," he said, very softly, poking both of them in the back to get their attention. "I have ... a real big favor to ask of you. It's the last one, I swear."

 

**(instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers)**

"Think about it like this: it'll be the greatest magic trick you've ever done in your entire life!" he told her, adjusting his tie close to his neck and smoothing it out, before snatching the playing cards off the bedside table and tucking them into a side pocket of the suitcase that had been donated to them.

"Really?" she said excitedly. He watched her reflection in the mirror contemplate this fact, worrying at her bottom lip and wringing her gloved hands together nervously. He went to her, securely tying her cape around her neck and flattening the edges where she'd sat on them with affectionate gruffness. She, in turn, ran her hands along the side of his head, pushing down all the stray hairs that had sprung loose. He'd found he'd developed a rather bad case of hat hair.

"Think of it ... like a lawyer's magic trick. There won't be any smoke or lights or things disappearing under tables, but if we pull this off, it'll give back to us for the rest of our lives. Do you understand what I'm saying?" She studied his face, determining that he was deadly serious, and bobbed her head firmly.

"I can do this."

"That's my girl." Taking a deep breath, he plucked his blue blazer off the back of Mrs. von Karma's rocking chair, where he'd thrown it that first night and hadn't looked at it since, and swung it around his shoulders.

The way it settled on his skin, fitting neat and snug around his chest and arms and waist like a second skin, made his throat go dry with an inarticulate longing. His fingers slipped on the buttons.

"Wow," said Trucy, looking up at him with wide eyes. "You look..."

"Yeah, I know," Phoenix said sadly, fingering the small, worn hole in his lapel, where he always used to pin his attorney's badge.

 

**(and you’ll learn that you really can endure)**

“There's only one place I'd trust for something so incredibly farfetched, Wright,” Edgeworth told him.

The law office he had in mind was separated from them by a two hour drive by car and a 45-minute journey by train, and Phoenix couldn't be certain they were still in Germany when Trucy shook him awake and told him it was show time. She looked so excited, bouncing this way and that and getting underfoot, that it made him worried she was going to give them away. At least, until Franziska said, dryly, "Finally, she is acting like a normal, foolhardy child. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with her."

The moment they entered, the secretary choked on her coffee and punched a button on her desk. The lawyer himself materialized from the back room as if summoned.

"Mr. Edgeworth!" he blinked in rapid succession. "What a ... I wasn't expecting you!"

Edgeworth folded his arms, drawing himself up in the way that could make even the tallest man shrink in on himself. The only thing that gave away his bluff was the faint edginess to his eyes. "Relax," he said to the fidgeting young lawyer. "I am just here to make sure a case of mine proceeds smoothly. You can't blame me for that."

"Of course not," stammered the other man, lowering his gaze. "And what exactly is the ..."

"It's a simple procedure, even for you," Edgeworth informed him with a cutting kindness. "Everything is done up. I merely need the signature and notarization of a comrade to make it official. Now, if you don't mind, shall we proceed into your office, where I can introduce you to the cast of characters?"

The lawyer jumped as if jolted, flushing at his mistake. He gestured them inside quickly.

"All right then," said Edgeworth when this was done, and another chair had been fetched to accommodate Trucy, who developed an intense liking to the miniature globe on the lawyer's desk. "The abridged version of this case. My client," he nodded to Phoenix, who shuffled awkwardly. "Has recently obtained a divorce from this young lady here." There was just enough patient scorn in his voice to give a negative impression, which was often the _death_ of the defense in court. The young woman who sat as far away from Phoenix as the tiny office would allow lifted her head in recognition of her presence, and he caught the faint, insulted flick of Franziska's eyes underneath her beanie hat before she ducked her head again.

They had to travel a long, long way to find a lawyer who was both in Edgeworth's pocket and who had never laid eyes on Franziska von Karma before, because if anyone recognized her their gig would be up in a heartbeat. But when Phoenix told her to disguise herself, he hadn't been expecting her to come downstairs looking like she was homeless, in jeans and a sweatshirt with worn elbows, and he'd almost told her to forget it, and go right back upstairs and change. The sheer idea of Franziska sacrificing her pride for him made him feel like the biggest fake on the planet.

"Not without trouble," Edgeworth's tone was dry. "Most everything was settled, sparing for the issue of who gained custody of their daughter here. That was the last thing decided."

Trucy beamed, coaxing a returning smile from the young, gullible man.

"My condolences," he said to Phoenix and Franziska, as if their fictional marriage was a family member they had recently put into the ground. "How can I help?"

"Trucy will be going to me. I will be her full-time care provider," Phoenix put in stiffly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw all three of them flinch at how wooden his voice sounded. He'd always been a terrible actor.

"She is not a piece of furniture that you're only getting because it looks good in the parlor room, husband," Franziska said tartly, ever the indignant wife, but something troubled had come to her face. Something more personal than her facade.

"As I said, everything is done up," Edgeworth stepped forward, tossing a slender ream of papers onto the desk in front of the lawyer. If he noticed that everyone caught their breath, he didn't show it -- he dutifully skimmed the papers, his pen hovering loosely around the bottoms, his brow creased thoughtfully. Collectively, everyone else in the room breathed out and in, if only to keep themselves from fainting.

_Any moment now,_ Phoenix thought in panic, _any moment now, he's going to leapt to his feet and call us frauds. Any moment now, he's going to notice. We did something wrong. We had to have done something wrong. It's not going to work. I'm going to lose her._

Trucy, who seemed to have a sixth sense for these kinds of things, slipped her tiny hand in between his, curbing his wild inner dialogue, and he clung to it like a lifeline.

All of them had stayed up rather late the night before, carefully forging the documents that were now being perused so casually. Their story, written up in complicated language of social security numbers and legalizations in Franziska's neat handwriting, was a simple, straight-forward tale of a man and woman. Phoenix had all his papers with him, so they hadn't taken much tweaking; he was a respectable American lawyer, all around. The only thing they fibbed (besides carefully downplaying the fact he’d been arrested about four times) was a statement saying he had dual citizenship in Germany thanks to a flighty actress mother, and a marriage certificate.

Franziska Wright, who shared said marriage certificate, had been completely fabricated, and he was sure it'd been deliberate on Franziska's part to make her the complete opposite of the Franziska von Karma who was going to portray her.

Trucy Wright had been born to them when Mrs. Wright was seventeen and Mr. Wright was eighteen. They'd married the summer she was due, genuinely, if naively, thinking they could build a life for her with each other. For nine years, they had more or less succeeded, and Trucy was a wholesome, healthy girl with enough spunk and character for three.

"I'm sure you understand why my signatures had to be few and far between," Edgeworth said to the young lawyer, and though his voice was schooled and light, it still seemed too loud in the silence. "This good country of ours has the habit of calling anything I sign into question these days. I must tell you, it makes it hard for a man to earn his living when he is constantly being cited."

"Yes, of course," said the lawyer uncomfortably. "I don't doubt you for a moment, Mr. Edgeworth. The way they treat you and your sister --" Franziska tensed up. "Is reprehensible, for sure, but after all, the bodies that govern us are only human. Your father, a murderer ... well, it does throw his perfect win record into a questionable light. It'll pass, I think. I admire your spirit for preserving this long."

"Hmmm."

He rifled through the papers again. "I think that's almost everything ... yes, you've all signed, I see. One last thing..." he set his pen down and looked squarely at Franziska, waiting until she met his eye questioningly. "I must ask you, my dear ... is this what you want? It will take perhaps six months for these papers to make their way to the Powers That Be, but once they are there, they cannot be reversed. You will have no rights to your own daughter, not legally."

They all looked at Franziska, waiting for her to say something scathing and be done with it, but she remained uncharacteristically quiet. She rocked back and forth in her seat, looking like she was a million miles away.

"I think ..." she said slowly. "I think ... Wait."

She turned to Phoenix, a fierce, electric energy running up her shoulders and flaring in her eyes. When she spoke, however, her voice was hard and from the corner of her mouth, like her words weren't really directed at him. "Do you remember, back when I was pregnant, I was so adamant about giving my child up for adoption?"

"Yes," said Phoenix, who had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

"We were too young, I said. We had too much ahead of us and too much behind us. No matter what, we couldn't create a healthy environment for us to raise our child in. My father was not a kind man --" here, Phoenix and Edgeworth winced, because according to the papers, Franziska Wright's father was a happy-go-lucky banker who'd been a member of the same losing swim team since before the Middle Eastern Wars. "And I was certain that I was going to emulate him."

She reached out, and inherently understanding, Trucy crossed the room to her. Franziska gripped her fingers tightly between her own and looked her in the eye. "But the moment I decided to keep you was the chance I had to break out of that rut. And I am so glad I did." She touched Trucy's hair, the curve of her face, and if they weren't mistaken, those were tears beading up at the corners of her eyes. "You've grown up so well, better than I ever thought possible. If only all children were like you."

Then, as if to make up for this display, she looked over at Phoenix and said with her usual acerbic bite, "And you, Mr. Phoenix Wright, had better take the best possible care of her you can, or so help me, I will track you down and fulfill my inheritance by shooting you myself!"

"Understood," said Phoenix meekly, waiting for someone to walk in and give her an Oscar.

Wiping her eyes with the faded cuff of her sweatshirt, she pulled Trucy to her in an awkward, one-armed hug. "I hope I was good to you, in the brief time I had you. And I think ... if anyone ever gave me the chance ever again, I could do it. I could be a mother."

"Okay," whispered Edgeworth, gutted. His eyes were wide and fixed unwaveringly on his sister. "Okay," he said again.

"Well said, I guess," said the young lawyer, who had absolutely no clue that he had just witnessed the heavens realigning. He turned to Trucy now. "The same goes for you, young lady. You're just as important in this matter as anybody else. Is this what you want? To go live with your father, permanently?"

Trucy had a speech prepared for this -- Phoenix had listened to her practice it over and over while they were working with the official documentation -- but in the light of what Franziska had just poured out, she seemed to have dropped all her notes. "I ... Yes. Yes," she said with pure emotion, no hint of deceit in her eyes or voice, and he remembered what she claimed magic was. "I trust him. I trust him very, very much. Yes."

If he thought this was a strange thing for a nine-year-old girl to say about her supposed father, the lawyer gave no indication.

Without flourish or ceremony, he signed the last space, and it was sealed.

 

**(that you really are strong)**

"Thank you," Phoenix said so quietly he was almost inaudible. He pushed the donated suitcase into the trunk of the cab, while Trucy bounced into the backseat without faltering once in her one-sided conversation with Franziska.

Edgeworth shrugged the thanks off with the kind of indifference that fooled no one. His smile was brittle as he watched Phoenix tuck the last loose strands of his hair up underneath his hat, two one-way plane tickets clenched between his teeth. 

"How does it feel, Wright?" he asked without bitterness, without warmth, without any expectations at all. "You who valued truth above all other things, who taught me and Franziska as such at the expense of our souls. How does it feel to have thrown that all away? With our help, putting our jobs at risk, you've successfully lied and manipulated the law of this country to get what you want. Is that what it means to be a defense attorney?"

Franziska looked up sharply at her brother's tone, and closed the cab door with a snap, cutting Trucy off mid-speech so she wouldn't have to hear. Her heart-shaped face contorted with annoyance, the little girl looked to Phoenix for support. His hand moved unconsciously to the front pocket of his hoodie, pressing into the crisp, new, official papers that said nothing could take her from him, no matter how they huffed and puffed, and he looked back at his friend, soft and unfazed. Burying himself beneath layers of psychosis was a trick Edgeworth had taught him.

"When I lost her case, Edgeworth, they asked me to turn in my badge," he said calmly, and both Franziska and Edgeworth jerked back as if struck; they were perhaps the only people, outside of those waiting for him at home, who would care about this fact. "Now, I'm just another average, unemployed, lying citizen. I'm also a father, just like you," his eyes moved meaningfully to Franziska, who unconsciously put her hands to her stomach.

"Will we see you again?" she asked.

"Probably. The California courts could use your help in whipping them into shape, if you ever get nostalgic."

"And I'm sure there's a certain young woman who wouldn't complain if you were to come and drop by her university." Her smile was sly.

"Good luck, Wright," Edgeworth added.

"Same to you."

He closed the trunk, and without looking back, slid into the backseat of the cab.

"Flughafen, please!" Trucy chirped to the cab driver, and then she turned to him, smiling. In her hands, she held a deck of cards.

 

**(and you really do have worth.)**

 

-  
fin


End file.
